I have actually heard there's a general windows xp bug when swapping out harddrives. At one point after backing up on my own external drive, my old pc got convinced that the favourites folder only existed on my external drive, ---- and I had to go through a fair amount of copying and rerooting shinanigans to fix it.
If you have a laptop or similar second machine, perhaps you could plug your external drive into that, copy the contents of your folder into another one and see if you could access that.
Generally, i've found "access is denied" can mean a lot of things, ---- including hardware error. my current pc tells me "access is denied" to my floppy disk drive, ---- when in fact there isn't! a floppy disk drive at all!
Well, I suppose it's lack of existance is denying me access, ;D.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)
